It's a bit simple, But I have met some clients who had not done it and it is really important, simply that we will have to take it into account when we upgrade our VMware ESX infrastructure, from a 3.x version to the 4.0. We will have to update the VMware Tools on the computers first and then update the Hardware version of the VMs.

The first thing to do is to update the VMware Tools to your computer, since “VM” > “Guest” > “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools”,

It tells us that it will uninstall the previous version of VMware tools, Accept,

On the virtual machine you will begin uninstalling the VMware Tools…

In principle we scored “Interactive Tools Upgrade” & “OK”,

And the VMware Tools installation wizard will begin, We follow him, We wait for you to install it and when we can, we turn off the VM.

Once the VM is turned off, with right click on it, Click on “Upgrade Virtual Hardware”,

“Yes” to confirm that we will upload the virtual hardware version of that virtual machine, since it is an irreversible process.

And once in the task panel we see that the virtual hardware is already updated, we can start the VM.